Now Showing

When temperatures climbed well over a hundred degrees for the third straight week, you could take refuge all afternoon in the Panorama for a buck and a half. It never mattered whether you walked into the luscious dark in the middle of the second act of The Guns of Navarone where Gregory Pack had to shoot the informer--it didn't even spoil the picture to know that she had been spying for the Nazis all along--since the second feature would wipe clean the action of the film you joined in medias res, and by the time the Guns of Navarone cycled back for a second showing three hours later, you were numb with candy and soda and air so cold you wore goosebumps.

I had long suffered my parents' long-winded recollections of going to the movies for five cents and spending those black-and-white afternoons of the Bronx and Brooklyn in a theater that not only offered two feature films, but a day's worth of newsreels, cartoons, short subjects, and boxes of raisinettes for three cents. When I was young, we went to Radio City and the music hall featured the line kicking, high-heeled legs of the Rockettes along with comics and side-show artists--and then you got the feature film, too.

But now I view my childhood days, golden and luminous, where Russ and Bruce and I would hop on our three-speed Schwinns and zip through the scorched avenues of Sepulvida, the asphalt already sticky by 11 am as we rode off to the Panorama and parked our bikes outside--without having to lock them against thieves--and ducked inside for at least five hours of shows.

They didn't care then how long you sat in the theater if you were reasonably behaved, and since the films rotated around the dial, you could cower at the brutality of mind control in The Invaders from Mars, then swoon at Haley Mills in The Parent Trap, and then slide back into a repeat nightmare of aliens drilling into the heads of suburbanites and planting mind-control chips in their brains.

No one yakked their brains out during the pictures; we sat rapt at the action on the screen; and no one had to sit in the blue glare of so many cell phones while kids wrote text messages or tossed popcorn at each other. We were in sacred space with tacky floors. At home, celluloid monsters stamped through Tokyo on tiny, black and white sets, but in the Panorama, green and red dinosaurs that lived in the center of the earth chowed down on wayward explorers across a 70-foot expanse of screen, their hideous screams blaring from overhead speakers!

I never had to explain, returning home, that I spent the entire day in a movie theater; my mother understood it was what you did during the heat of day. I desperately yearned to escape the bonds of suburbia with its tidy lawns and self-same thoroughfares to the salt-sea treehouse that the Robinson family built on their deserted island. I prayed for a loyal, cast-iron friend like Tobor the Great, a mechanical buddy assembled in a government lab by a nerd in a white coat (Tobor, by the way, is "robot" spelled backwards). The brilliant beaches of Zuma and Malibu lay just over the pass from our house in the Valley, but I was content to sit in the Panorama (a quarter of the way back, in the center) and imagine I was Moondoggie, buried in sand to my neck and kissed on the mouth by Annette Funicello while the gulls screeched insanely overhead.

You did more than escape the heat those afternoons in the Panorama. And afterwords, Bruce and Russ and I would race through the dirt lots, nosing each other off like Saberjet pilots, skidding around parked cars and screaming out Gregory Peck's lines all the way through Mission Hills, through the alleys and backstreets, blessed with good fortune and a belly full of popcorn as the evening sun ducked beyond the Santa Susana Mountains and we knew that dinner was on the table and it would soon be cool enough to sleep, to dream.

Ennui.com

Random House swept in and bought a digital bookstore start-up that I worked for in order to kill it off before it became competitive. Two days later, nearly broke, I was snapped up by Eufemizm, a multinational web consulting firm opening an office in the heart of Silicon Valley. This was the era when Stanford minted technology degrees as quickly as the Bush Administration printed money. Twentysomethings were CEOs, leading the charge of consulting companies that took your idea and converted it into a concept for millions of dollars.

I was interviewed in the San Francisco office by Monkeyboy, a pathological liar who could sell famine to India. He danced about, speed-clicking through a presentation about the company, weaving fast chat around the notion that I had "the perfect skill set" to become the senior content strategist at the new office the firm was opening in San Jose. When I told him I had no experience in writing business briefs, organizing a web site in concert with information architects, designers, brainy technologists, and C-level executives, Monkeyboy reassured me I would have comprehensive "on-boarding"--not to worry.

To wit: he sent me down to Silicon Valley with a fat paycheck and marching orders to lead the editorial and content role in a multi-million-dollar project designing a new website for a major player in the software field. I had "deliverables" due immediately, writing a strategy for the new website, understanding the kinds of visitors (users) it served, the kinds of products and services the company sold (circuit board testing and design equipment), and the best way to write their "brand message across the entire user experience".

My training? To visit the internal repository at Eufemizm where documents that were prepared for previous clients could be cannibalized into fresh "deliverables" for the software maker. I'll be down soon to help you get going, Monkeyboy promised, but in the nine months I worked for Eufemizm, he never showed.

In principle, we were a team of writers, digital designers, technologists (back-end code writers), and over-caffeinated business managers that created websites for Fortune 500 companies, cataloging so-called business and technical requirements, producing reams of paperwork and reports, creating sample designs, and handing over the finished product in record time. I was entreated to handle every aspect that involved nouns and verbs, while the rest of the staff handled dots and dashes, ones and zeros.

In the office, the Twentysomethings zipped around the floor on Razr scooters, yakking all the while on cell phones, dressed in the customary black slacks, black shirts, and Eufemizm caps. The fridge was stocked with junk food, beer, and soft drinks, and you were encouraged to work late into the night, napping in any number of beanbag chairs piled into cubicles.

I lived in a 250 square-foot studio apartment near the San Jose Airport. You entered the door, tripped over the couch, and passed out from exhaustion after one of Eufemizm's 16 hour days. I heard every 737 that coasted to the airfield, its engines roaring in reverse thrust to slow to a taxi. The Eufemizm office was scarcely three miles away, but it took 45 minutes every morning and eve to join the lemming dance of sports utility vehicles and little black sedans that choked the city streets.

Toward the end of the year, I had somehow cloned myself into my own version of a Twentysomething, extending the contract with the software maker by handing in my deliverables on time and parroting the sophisticated lingo of the Valley. I was a thundering success. My champion had been right: I had the precise skill set to do this work. I came in late and left early.

But the Twentysomethings had miscalculated their reach. Overseas offices began to fall off the email menu. A new manager was hired to butcher the staff and sell off furniture. One day I came into Eufemizm and found myself alone in a corner wing. We were downsizing. We were consolidating our assets. We were taking the lead in slenderizing operations. My friends were cutting and pasting themselves into the offices of new employers.

Eufemizm had nearly failed by the time I left to take my new-found talents to the web team in the California governor's office. But that's another story--of sloth and greed and payoffs. This ends as suddenly as it began. I emailed my resignation to San Francisco. Monkeyboy--who still works for Eufemizm--was very, very busy that day and had no time to reply.